You don't automate a basketball game, spending time with friends, or caring for your children. Automating is for menial, repetitive tasks. That's been the foundation for software. Software should automate toil, make our lives easier, save us time.
AI has now blurred the lines of tasks that should be automated and tasks that shouldn't. We now have to make these decisions intentionally, and it's never been a harder decision.
tasks: [ toil ] [ reading & writing ]
│ │
│ ▼
│ ┌────────────────┐
│ │ you decide │
│ └────────┬───────┘
│ ┌─────┴─────┐
▼ ▼ ▼
┌──────────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────────┐
│ workflow │ │ kept human │
│ │ │ │
│ trigger ──▶ steps │ │ judgment, craft, │
│ ──▶ repeat │ │ basketball, family │
└──────────────────────┘ └──────────────────────┘The easy automation decisions
Much of software is bookkeeping. They turn paper records into digital records. Use a tax software, your tax forms go from your computer to the IRS. Use Excel, your paper records are now in spreadsheets.
Then came software for moving data. These software solutions automate copy-paste interactions and switching from one software to another. Your software could "talk" to each other, where an event in a CRM would trigger an email to be sent. Every day, profiles on the internet were scraped and a report was created. These automations are simple, they're transparent, and build systems to let humans make judgements.
The hard automations, AI automating reading and writing
When I worked with natural language models back in 2020, they didn't behave like LLMs. They were used for basic classifications, another example of an easy automation. But now LLMs, AI can automate the reading and writing of text essentially.
Asking AI to summarize the reading of a long report. Asking AI to generate a 5 page documents. These are all automations for reading and writing. Back to our definition of "automation," where the offloading should be for menial, repetitive tasks, should reading and writing fall into that bucket?
My automation credo
My personal rule when it comes to the decision on when to use AI to automate is:
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I ask myself how valuable is it for me to understand the material?
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If it is valuable, even if it's menial, then I will not automate with AI. I'll read all of the pages; I'll organize the architecture of the codebase; I'll write the outline, draft, and final copy of this blog post.
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If it's not valuable, then I ask if automating this work affects anyone else aversely? If it doesn't, let's automate. If it does, then don't.
Automation is now a choice, and like all of our choices, we should consistently ask ourselves if it's beneficial to ourselves and if it hurts others.
- I can "automate" calorie needs by eating the greasiest cheeseburger with 1000 calories, but is it valuable to me?
- The answer is no, so I generally don't do it.
- I can "automate" customer support tickets with an LLM, but if the context is too specific for an LLM to handle with high confidence, does it hurt others?
- The answer is yes, so I don't automate it.
- I can "automate" reading the first page of hackernews and let AI write me a newsletter with articles I might be interested in, but is it valuable to me to read it myself?
- The answer is not super valuable, so I automate it.
Why fl0w is the AI agent that makes you decide
Fl0w.work gives you a personal remote computer for you to automate workflows. I designed the experience to be:
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Opinionated: you automate specific sessions of your choosing. These sessions become templatized instructions for future workflows that can run every day, every hour, every time an event occurs.
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Frictionless: once you've made that decision to automate a task, you shouldn't have to configure a server, add connectors, or login to anything. The tools and skills you used in a local session apply to your remote workflow.
Intention will soon be the differentiator for how a task is done. The intention to automate and put less thought into it. The intention to grind away at a task you could automate. Try fl0w to practice the intuition and automate workflows on your personal laptop and on your new remote computer at fl0w.work.